WS-governance: A policy language for SOA governance

Abstract

The widespread use of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is beginning to create problems derived from the governance of said structures. To date there is not a single effective solution to solve all existing challenges to govern this type of infrastructure. This paper describes the problems encountered when designing a SOA governance solution in a real e-Government scenario. More specifically, we focus on problems related to specification and automated analysis of government policies. We propose a novel SOA governance specification model as a solution to these problems. We have named this model WS-Governance. In order to ease its adoption by SOA practitioners it: i) shares WS-Policy guidelines and is compatible with it, ii) has XML serialization as well as a plain-text one and iii) has a semantics based on a mapping to Constraint Satisfaction Problems that provides a precise description as well as facilitating the automation of some editing and WS-Governance related activities such as consistency checking. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.